A Louisiana boy finds a home in Tennessee

Archive for December, 2012

I ran out of Tide laundry detergent this week, so I’m trying something I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of years. I made my own laundry detergent.

The ingredients

I’ve seen dozens of recipes on how to do this on the Internet the past couple of years. A friend made some recently and I figured, why not, especially since I can buy all the ingredients here in Nashville.

It ain’t rocket science and come Friday evening, I’ll be able to tell you whether it works or not.

The total cost for ingredients was about $12. But I have enough raw ingredients left over that all I’ll need for a fresh batch is a bar of soap.

Here’s what you need:

A bar of soap. I used Dr. Bronner’s All in One Castile Soap citrus scented bar. It’s olive-oil based and made from all natural ingredients

2 cups of Arm & Hammer Washing Soda

2 cups of 20 Mule Team Borax

1 cup of baking soda

Grate the bar of soap (I used a cheese grater) and stir in the other ingredients in a large bowl. Mix it really well. Lots of stirring. Then put your mixture in a container with a lid. (I was going to use old pickle jars but scored a tall Christmas tin from work today.) And shake the heck out of your mixture again. Shake it a lot. You want it to be as homogenous as possible when you use it. So shake it some more. Then shake it again before you use it. Keep it out of your eyes, though. (Who knew you could flush your eyes with a neti pot?)

I’ll start out using a tablespoon per load and let you know how it goes.

UPDATE: Dec. 21. Did 4 loads of clothes. 1 tablespoon per load is fine. Low suds, mild citrus smell out of the wash. No scent after time in the dryer with an unscented Bounce fabric softener sheet. Clothes are clean, but none were really soiled going in. A trip to Louisiana coming up should end up with some crawfish juice on something and we’ll see how this works on that.